First Published: Frontline, Vol. 4, No. 11, November 24, 1986.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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While trying to make Western investment more attractive, the CPC has also concluded that China stands to gain by improving its economic ties with the Soviet Union and re-establishing more normal political relations with the socialist camp generally. Trade with the Soviet Union has been growing rapidly, from a net of $160 million in 1981 to $1.2 billion in 1984 and $1.9 billion in 1985. Nevertheless, this still came to only three percent of China’s total foreign trade and was only 30% of China’s trade with the U.S.
A recently concluded pact anticipates a volume of $6 billion in Sino-Soviet trade by 1990. The Soviets are supplying China with industrial equipment, iron, steel, non-ferrous metals, electrical power equipment, timber, chemical products and a variety of transport In the past five years, China has purchased 46 modem airliners, more than 50,000 trucks and cars and some 14,000 motorcycles from the USSR In turn, the Soviet Union has bought tungsten, other minerals, foodstuffs, ’handicrafts and textiles from China.
In addition, a new Sino-Soviet agreement on economic and technical cooperation signed last year calls for Soviet assistance in building seven new projects and modernizing 17 others which were built with Soviet assistance back in the 1950s.
Despite these improvements in the economic realm, political ties between the two countries are still cool. Beijing insists that Moscow must make substantial shifts in three areas before relations can get better: reducing the size of its troop deployments along the Sino-Soviet border; removing its troops from Afghanistan; and pressuring Vietnam to withdraw its troops from Kampuchea. (In an interview with, CBS newscaster Mike Wallace September 2, Deng underscored the fact that while there were three bones of contention between China and the Soviet Union, there was only one with the U.S. – the question of Taiwan.)
A major attempt to break the logjam in Sino-Soviet relations was launched by Soviet Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev this past summer when, in a sweeping public statement delivered in the Soviet Asian city of Vladivostok, Gorbachev announced the withdrawal of 6,000 Soviet troops from Afghanistan and offered a significant concession on the disputed border. But in his CBS interview, Deng made it clear that Beijing considers the Kampuchean question the linchpin. “The Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea constitutes the main obstacle in Sino-Soviet relations,” Deng told Wallace. “Gorbachev evaded this question in his Vladivostok speech. This is why I say that the Soviet Union has not taken a big step toward the removal of the three major obstacles.”
At the same time, Beijing has taken steps to improve its relations with the Eastern European countries – not only at the state-to-state level but also at a party-to-party level. The recent visits of Polish leader Wojcieh Jaruzelski and East German party leader Erich Honecker were undoubtedly intended by Beijing as a signal that party-to-party ties with Moscow could also be put on the agenda if and when the Soviets back down on the Kampuchea question.
This warming trend has created some anxieties in Washington which continues to see its “China, card” as an important counterweight to the strength of the socialist camp. But while Beijing clearly does not want to risk damaging its ties with the U.S., it is also unlikely that the CPC will back away from its efforts to seek better relations with the socialist camp. For in its pragmatic search for aid, looking East clearly offers China a number of advantages.
First, as is already evident, re-establishing ties with the socialist camp deals Beijing a much stronger hand in relation to the U.S. and also gets some of its eggs out of the Western basket. Secondly, the Chinese can often get a better deal, with fewer strings attached. By exchanging products via bartering with the Soviet Union, the Chinese do not need to spend the hard currency needed in trade with the West. And finally, the easing of tensions with Moscow, will eventually enable China to cut back on its costly military expenditures.
In light of these policy changes, the ideological underpinnings of the Cultural Revolution could no longer be sustained. A process of “de-Maoization” has been underway in China for most of the decade since Mao’s death. A June 1981 Central Committee resolution underscored Mao’s “grave mistakes” during the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward of the late fifties. Mao’s contributions – still officially proclaimed as far outweighing his errors – are seen primarily in his leadership of the national democratic struggle which resulted in the ouster of the Kuomintang regime. At the same time, without much public fanfare, such theoretical tenets of Maoism as the assertion that capitalism had been restored in the Soviet Union and other countries of the socialist camp, that ideology and class struggle were the key to economic development, and that “modem revisionism” had taken over the international communist movement were quietly dropped. (For a fuller discussion of this point, see “Marxism in China Today,” Frontline, Oct. 13, p. 2.)
Nevertheless, these changes have not brought the CPC back to a clear-cut Marxist-Leninist outlook. Rather they have removed pseudo-Marxist terminology as the justifications for the CPC’s fundamentally nationalist orientation. But that nationalist orientation itself has not at all been modified.
This can be seen not only in the CPC’s conception of building Chinese socialism independently of the developing world socialist system – a course which cannot help but propel it into close economic and political ties with imperialism – but even in its view of the “three obstacles” to the improvement of its relations with the Soviet Union. Clearly its concern with the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan – and Beijing’s material support to the reactionary CIA-backed contras there – stems from the fact that China has a small common border with Afghanistan. In the case of Kampuchea, its position is even more blatant and is rooted in a centuries-old Chinese conception of Indochina as its own natural “sphere of influence” and the, key to establishing China as a major world power on a par with the U.S. and the USSR.
With the CPC boldly experimenting with market principles and private enterprise, many China-watchers are waiting for the other shoe to drop: what does all this mean politically? Seeking to push China even further down the path of the bourgeois social arrangement, the London Economist asked (May 31): “Can China permanently reconcile the needs of a decentralised economy with the urges of a centralizing party?”
Within the CPC it appears that a group of more orthodox Marxists are also concerned that many of Deng’s reforms may be opening the door to a restoration of capitalism. Seizing on the problems associated with the economic program, forces grouped around Chen Yun, the most influential figure in the CPC after Deng, have been somewhat effective in calling attention to the present and potential dangers. Their reservations, as well as the major economic jolts of 1985, forced the Dengists into declaring 1986 a “consolidation year,” halting all new reforms, while also calling on the CPC to uphold socialist morality.
Signs of this struggle could be seen in the final resolution to emerge from the Sept. 28 Central Committee plenum. While overall endorsing Deng’s path, the document underscores its view that “Reform means the development and perfection of the socialist system“ and poses the question clearly on the minds of many: “Will we be able to resist the decadent bourgeois and feudal ideologies and avoid the danger of deviating from the right direction?“ In addition – and strikingly absent from Deng’s comments in his talk with CBS – is the declaration that “We resolutely reject the capitalist ideological and social systems that defend oppression and exploitation, and we reject all the ugly and decadent aspects of capitalism.”
Despite evident qualms that go right up into the CPC Politburo, Deng’s position seems secure. At the same 1985 party meeting in which Chen Yun attacked the reform policies, Deng engineered the biggest leadership shake-up in CPC history, placing Deng loyalists at all levels of the party leadership. Most significant of these changes was the appointment to the ruling Politbureau of Deng proteges Hu Qili, 56, and Li Peng, 57, the likely successors to the positions of Party General Secretary and Prime Minister, respectively.
Making some deft concessions to his critics, Deng has called for more ideological study in the “evidence of bourgeois decadence” and shifted the political terrain of party debate away from the reforms per se to an analysis of party problems and the need for more “socialist democracy.” Under the guidance of Hu Qili, party reformers have revived the “Double Hundred” campaign. Drawn from the Maoist period’s “Let a hundred flowers blossom, let a hundred schools of thought contend,” the campaign is seen as a push for greater democracy by Deng’s faction in an effort to strengthen support for reform and to free up enterprising managers from attack by more orthodox party officials.
Straining in the other direction, forces concerned with a potentially sharp rightward trend, managed to get a warning against the dangers of bourgeois democracy inserted into the final resolution adopted at the recent Central Committee meeting: “It is wrong to regard Marxism as a rigid dogma,” says the document. “It is also wrong to negate its basic tenets, view it as an outmoded theory and blindly worship bourgeois philosophies and social doctrines.”
The changes unfolding in China are complex and the questions are many. Is Deng leading a capitalist restoration or will China remain on the socialist path? Can the market techniques aid the modernization without liquidating the very conception of socialist development? Will the de-Maoification continue and thus improve Sino-Soviet relations?
As China walks a thin line between East and West and plan and market, many analysts remain skeptical about the project’s validity. The Wall Street Journal, clearly impatient with China’s fitful hesitations in seeing the economic reforms all the way through to their logical conclusion, warned (Oct. 2), “If China is to realize the staggering potential of a billion people profiting from the free exchange of information and goods, capitalism is the only road to take.”
The Soviets are also concerned, but their criticism Is more circumspect these days. According to the Far Eastern Economic Review (Aug. 14), Gorbachev’s private concerns about China’s course were spelled out in a recent meeting with the secretaries for economic affairs of the East European communist parties, at which he said: “Some of you look at the market as a lifesaver for your economies. But comrades, you should not think about lifesavers but about the ship. And the ship is socialism.”
With signals pointing in both directions, the question of China’s actual path – capitalist or socialist – is not yet a settled question. The latest trend is unquestionably encouraging. And certainly it is hard to Imagine – the Wall Street Journal notwithstanding – that capitalism can help China overcome its enormous problems of underdevelopment and economic backwardness. Nor are experiments with controlled features of capitalist enterprise unknown in the history of socialism.
But there is no inherently magical power in the formal proclamation of a commitment to socialism, and the danger remains that an essentially pragmatic policy framed by narrow nationalist considerations could undermine the material foundations of a socialism which is far from being consolidated in China either in the economic realm or ideologically.